The Athletic has live coverage of the 2024 NBA trade deadline. Follow along for updates.
The Milwaukee Bucks have not yet made a roster move before this year’s trade deadline, but general manager Jon Horst has still been busy during the last few weeks in an attempt to improve the roster.
On Jan. 23, the Bucks dismissed first-year head coach Adrian Griffin. Three days later, the Bucks hired Doc Rivers for the position. In the press conferences for both decisions, Horst told reporters the corresponding moves were made with the belief that they would help the Bucks improve their chances of winning a championship this season.
The coaching change has kept the attention off potential roster moves before the NBA trade deadline on Thursday, Feb. 8 at 3 p.m. ET. As Bucks fans know, Horst is aggressive this time of year and typically finds a way to make some sort of move, whether it is a trade or adding a player on the buyout market.
With that in mind, here is everything you need to know with less than a week left to the trade deadline.
Salary-cap situation
As always, our trade deadline primer starts with a detailed look at the Bucks’ salary cap sheet. No matter how creative Horst wants to get, it will require him to play within the latest collective bargaining agreement’s rules, which are quite restrictive for teams in the Bucks’ situation.
Before this season, the league informed teams that the salary cap for the 2023-24 NBA season would be $136,021,000 and the luxury-tax threshold would be $165,294,000. On top of that, the league also told teams that the first luxury-tax apron would be $172,294,000 and the second luxury-tax apron would be $182,794,000.
Last summer, I enlisted the help of former NBA executive John Hollinger to help explain that while the Bucks didn’t initially appear to be over the second apron, they actually would be seen as a second-apron team by the league’s salary cap rules. The confusion around that was removed when the Bucks traded for Damian Lillard. It is straightforward now.
The Bucks are a second-apron team.
With 15 players on their NBA roster, the Bucks currently have a full roster, and their 15 salaries currently total $183,584,668. If their cap table looks like this at the end of the season, factoring in the luxury-tax repeater penalties, the Bucks ownership group will end up making a luxury-tax payment of roughly $57.7 million.
The Bucks are a top-heavy roster from a salary-cap perspective again this season. Giannis Antetokounmpo ($45,640.084) and Damian Lillard ($45,640,084) take up 49.7 percent of the Bucks’ salary cap. Add in Khris Middleton ($29,320,988) and Brook Lopez ($25,000,000), and the top four players on the Bucks roster account for $145.6 million of the $183,584,668 in salary, or roughly 79.3 percent of the Bucks’ salary-cap sheet.
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